Unmarried women, people of color, and millennials could cast a majority of votes in every election — but only if they vote.

Unmarried Women

While our overall goal is to increase civic participation among the whole Rising American Electorate, we’ve always been particularly focused on unmarried women — women who have never been married, or who are separated, divorced, or widowed. We were the first organization to identify unmarried women as a key political group.

Unmarried women play a crucial role in our political life—and policymakers and other elected officials ignore unmarried women at their own peril.

Unmarried Women in America

Unmarried women are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the United States; between 2000 and 2014, the number of unmarried women in the U.S. increased by over 12 million.

By the 2016 election, a majority of voting-eligible women in the United States will be unmarried:

Unmarried Women’s Voter Participation

In the 2016 election, unmarried women will make up the majority of vote-eligible women in the United States—but too many of them aren’t registered to vote. In the 2014 election, unmarried women were a slim minority of vote-eligible women—but only cast two-thirds as many votes as married women:

That’s why it’s so important to us to help unmarried women register to vote and show up at the polls. Unmarried women could be the key to understanding the whole of the 2016 election—but only if they’re registered and vote.

The Marriage Gap

For example, in the 2012 presidential election, if unmarried women had voted the same way as married women, Mitt Romney would have won:

Despite its crucial importance in American elections, the marriage gap doesn’t occupy a central place in our political conversation. Too many pollsters don’t break down marital status in their polling, and too many political commentators talk about “women” as if they’re a single electoral bloc, rather than focusing on the unique characteristics of unmarried women in the American electorate.

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